Over the weekend the last instances have been upgraded to Winter ’21 release, so it is finally time to check the release notes. When I saw that Keir has been able to choose top 6 improvements I’ve been impressed with the ability to choose the top one. After reading through 600+ pages I’m not surprised anymore. I mean, there are tons of great things, as always, but actually just a few I might use or want to pay any attention.
One liners
- email-to-case don’t send RefId in body/subject anymore but depend on info in header (where user don’t see it/cannot change);
- High Velocity Sales (great new products for last a few releases) introduced limits for daily sent mails and active targets – as we say in Czech, they opened the pub and people wanted to get in;
- you can optimize the opportunity scoring model, if you want to remove some data/opportunities from the model;
- you can enable new Order save behavior, which will trigger Order validation rules and PB/flows when a new order product is added;
- Lightning Sync is not available for new customer, Einstein Analytics Capture is the future. And Outlook plug-in now supports shared mailboxes;
- my domain will be enforced in Winter ’22 (actually they had this plan a few releases back and didn’t went public with it, so will see this time);
- there is a new base LWC component which will you to scan barcode (beta) – one of the great feature you might need to solve some CTA scenarios;
- @AuraEnabled Apex Class security will be enforced – you need to provide users access to all these classes, from now on the access is no provided by default just because they have access to the LWC/Aura component.
Great things
- Apex safe navigator operator is one of the awesome things to me. Till know you source code was full if( x == null), not you can use ? instead (contactRec.Account?.Name) and you will either get account name or null;
- Scratch org shape (beta) – no more problems with setting up the scratch org project the same way as your production instance, now you can just specify orgId and Salesforce DX will set the scratch org the same way;
- CDC event enrichment – by default CDC sends just changed field and the remote system needs to do a call-in if it needs more data. Now you can provide some fields in the results every time;
- auto add new custom fields to custom report types – this was a long missing feature, that custom report types don’t automatically get all the awesome new fields you create. But at the same time, maybe (just sometimes) the point is not to include all fields and have the report type super simple to make it easier for the users. Yeah, you cannot make happy everyone (this feature needs to be enabled in setup);
- Einstein Data Prep came as beta in Summer ’20 and now is generally available and boy … that looks awesome!
Things so good they have even picture
- see changed deals at glance on kanban – you can see the change in dates or amount right on the kanban;
- Email Template Builder aka let you users make sexy emaily right in the Salesforce from different blocks. Sounds promising, will see the results;
- CPQ Asset Lifecycle Management – CPQ is all about upsales and being able to see it in visual form is super sexy. Not sure how useful for AEs, but sexy;
Flow
Flow should have it is own paragraph, so many new things (and I skipped a few of them):
- before-delete flow, which allows you to delete related record as well. It doesn’t (really) allow you to block the user from deleting the record (as is possible in APEX), the only way how to achieve the same is in combination with validation rule, which you set to fail in the flow. Not nice solution;
- debug as other user (in sandbox);
- change trigger running on specific change (rather then on all of them and decision element checking whether to process or not);
- easy access related records data – no more Get Elements just to get information from related Account, now you can use the . approach to go up as well;
- paused flow interviews resume in the same context with the same user access – this was more to remove some possible security hole;
- multi-columns screen flow, because they make sense in a lot of cases.
Health Cloud, Financial Service Cloud, Public Sector Solutions, Consumer Goods Cloud, Manufacturing Cloud, Batch Management, Data Processing Engine, Emergency Response Management, Commerce Cloud – so many additional clouds and solutions (some in beta) with new features, where I just gave up to know them at all. I have my limits as well.
And what did you find and can use on daily basis?